1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an apparatus and a method for performing an Automatic Retransmission reQuest (ARQ) in a wireless communication system, and more particularly, to an apparatus and a method for performing the ARQ in a wireless relay communication system.
2. Description of the Related Art
A wireless communication system is subject to error in specific data depending on a channel condition of a radio resource. An error control and recovery method largely includes an ARQ scheme and a Frame Error Check (FEC) scheme. The ARQ scheme requests the retransmission of the compromised data from a receiver to a sender. The FEC scheme corrects the error of the compromised data at the receiver.
When the wireless communication system adopts the ARQ scheme, the receiver checks whether an error occurs by decoding the received packet. When the received packet does not have an error, the receiver sends an acknowledgement (ACK) signal to the sender.
When the received packet has an error, the receiver sends a Negative ACK (NACK) signal to the sender.
Upon receiving the ACK signal from the receiver, the sender transmits a new packet. Upon receiving the NACK signal from the receiver, the sender retransmits the packet to the receiver.
Recently, wireless communication systems have applied a relay scheme using a relay station to provide a better radio channel to a terminal in a cell boundary or a shadow area. In other words, the wireless relay communication system can provide the better radio channel between a base station and the terminal by relaying data between the base station and the terminal via the relay station. The wireless relay communication system therefore requires an ARQ method using the relay station.